Network function virtualization (NFV) bears a function of a specialized device in a conventional network by using a general-purpose hardware device and a virtualization technology to implement software/hardware decoupling, so that a network device no longer relies on special-purpose hardware, thereby reducing high costs due to deployment of the specialized device. A party that can receive a virtualization request and perform virtualization processing on a corresponding service according to the request is referred to as a virtualization service provider. A party that initiates the virtualization request is referred to as a service requester.
A virtualized network service (NS) in NFV may be a network service of an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), or may be a network service of an Evolved Packet Core (EPC). One NS may further include several virtualized network function (VNF) modules. One VNF may include multiple virtualized network function components (VNFC). Each VNFC includes multiple processing nodes. A packet needs to be processed by at least two VNFCs in the VNF.
Referring to FIG. 1, FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a process of packet processing in the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, a packet is input to a VNFC1 inside the VNF by using an external communications network, and is forwarded to a VNFC2 after being processed by the VNFC1. Then a dispatch node receiving the packet in the VNFC2 obtains flow information according to a rule and generates a flow label, and then selects a processing node of the VNFC2 according to the flow label. The entire processing procedure is complex, and efficiency is relatively low. Consequently, system overheads are relatively large.